It is not without meaning that millions of hands, all around the world, everyday pick up a rosary of beads and chant or meditate on the Holy Name. In Aramaic, the Name might be "Alaha"... in other languages it will be "Radha-Krishna", "Jesus" or "Yeshua", "Amma" or "Mother"... and then "secret Names" such as "My Love", "Beloved Friend", "One Love", and even "Divine Rascal"... And then there is the silent chant of the breath, simply flowing in and out like a gentle murmur of a forest stream, "Om", "Hu", and "Amen"... But for each and all of the Names that reach up from our hands or flow out of our hearts, there is the well-spring of Love: steadily working the hidden magic of transformation...In every clime and place, the minds and hearts of humans have embraced the possibility of "something more": wonder in every generation gives birth to the possibility of Divine Encounters... so we pray, we create music and art, we write poetry, we make movies, we dance across the Planet, and we make love in our endless search for Divine Love, for the Mystery of Oneness that animates our dreams... Our meditations and chanting might be on a silent retreat with Trappist monks, with a Vietnamese teacher, with a Sufi master, with a Hare Krishna lover, or with an activist group on a busy street protesting violence or organizing for justice... We might embrace our lover in sexual union and pause to breathe in the Oneness that is our essential nature and reality... The essential understanding of chanting the Divine Names is the mystery of invocation: to invoke a Divine Name is to choose -- for that moment -- to live within Remembrance: we remember the One as the One remembers us: until we live in an unbroken awareness of "no separation" and "Only One"... Chanting and meditation is the slow and steady unification of life into the sacred rhythm of giving and receiving Love: Divine Pleasure and Bliss is the very "super-natural" reality of the "What if? before the Big Bang": we are That... we forget and then, ah!

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Robert Daniel Smith was privileged to serve the homeless and marginalized for 30 years in Salinas, California. Together with his wife, Michelle, they founded an intentional community called the 'Companions of the Way', also in Salinas. Robert and Michelle are community organizers, Catholic Worker renegades, sacred activists, writers, poets, artists, Divine Mother devotees, and practitioners of Kriya Yoga as taught by Rev. Ellen Grace O'Brian of the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment. Michelle is also a Montessori public school teacher. Robert is also an ordained Interfaith Minister.

​"Currently living in the Midwest, we are imagining and preparing for our next adventure: beginning another intentional community modeled after the Findhorn Community in Scotland and serving disadvantaged children and youth."

​Might you share our passion for intentional possibilities, for the practice of beauty, and for living lives of deep purpose and a nonviolent kindness?